Devante Scholfield

Waterfront Refresh was born as we saw need for a lakeside maintenance and services company. Waterfront Refresh serves seasonal and year round lakeside home owners in taking care of the common duties of owning a lakeside home, thus creating time and energy for owners to enjoy their residence and handle other tasks. Being a seasonal operation, we plan to expand by hiring out more great individuals, increase marketing for customer growth, and create more time for the owner to grow into other ventures.

2023 brought on an exciting season of carrying out various duties such as:

• Driving Customer Growth and Retention
• Client Service Strategy
• Hiring and Directing employees and outside contractors
• Brand Marketing
• Future Business Planning
• Getting to serve a lot of great people

After completing 9 months working within Hospitality and Resort development, I turned towards Greystar with focused intention to broaden my understanding of managing Multifamily Real Estate at a large scale. Greystar was the go-to as they are the largest property management company in the world. Within 1 Year, I had the unique opportunity to drive leasing operations at 3 different locations within the Twin Cities. I found great value in experiences such as:

• Increasing Leases and Customer Quality of Living
• Collecting, Reviewing, and Sharing Leasing Data with Ownership Groups
• Identifying and Communicating strengths and weaknesses of each property's sales and management systems
• Implementing New Strategy

Other Great things I took away:

• What Investors, and Residents are looking for in a multifamily property.
• How to Optimize the Leasing Process and manage the property to meet all those needs.
• Do what works.
• "Choose to Get it done right away, Don't Delay" attitude - Serve peoples needs right away if you can. Don't wait.

Taking on an exciting role at a timeless wisconsin resort which had been closed and off market since covid struck, my role was to provide as much value to customers in a fast paced, newly developing environment. With a new owner purchase and the business looking to open their doors again, there was much work to be done. The goal of reopening the Alpine was to keep its timeless charm while modernizing its amenities and driving better customer interaction methods.This was executed by implementing the following methods:

• Collaborating with owners and staff to define project objectives and criteria.
• Performing analysis to identify areas of improvement.
• Interacting with internal customers to understand business needs and translate into requirements.
• Applied honed problem-solving skills to analyze and resolve issues impacting business operations and goal achievement.
• Ensuring that the hospitality provided at the Alpine was enough to make it stand out as a discussion point alone in customer satisfaction.

This was carried out across the Golf Course and Clubhouse, Hotel and Lodging, Restaurant, Valet, Marina, and Grounds Crew Services.

After moving on from interning at CVPM, I decided it was time to learn all I could about residential sales. I took a greater step forward in understanding the processes involved, where I worked closely with the team in ensuring all contracts, checks, and listing + offer documents were up to standard.

During this time I studied online and received my Wisconsin sales license. Shortly after, I jumped into residential sales full time working for that office. I had a great time working with buyers closing on multiple homes during this time. In January of 2022 I decided it was time to explore more of my interests while adding more skills and experience.

The highest value experience I found from these was:

• Defining and Meeting Customer needs
• Understanding and Drafting legal contracts
• Working with many parties closely to ensure a transaction comes to a great close (Buyers, Sellers, Mortgage, Title, Etc.)
• Taking Joy in serving others with what you do.

I had the great honor of becoming one of the first interns at one of the fastest growing property management companies in Western Wisconsin, at the time managing about 600 units and counting, the majority comprised of Single Family Leased Homes, with some commercial and multifamily properties in between.

In addition to leading sales and rental marketing efforts, I was also instructed in contract auditing. This was a unique experience that taught me to look closely for errors in detailed offers and to file them with organization. At the time we did everything by paper, and since then things have quickly changed!

The experience with this company was invaluable to say the least in beginning my journey of working people and placed within the realm of real property. A few of the greatest takeaways were:

• Taking photos/video of properties and using them in all listings and marketing media.
• Listing, Marketing, Showing, and Inspecting properties.
• Working with Owners, Tenants, Vendors, Maintenance to ensure customer and company success.
• Navigating working with dissatisfied tenants to resolve issues.
• Understanding what drives tenants to your market, how to highlight things of Real Value, and to inform prospects of that information
• Focusing on how to relay the information to prospects
• Collecting and presenting weekly data to the offices of property numbers, issues to resolve, etc.
• Auditing Sales contracts (OTPs, Listing Contracts)
• Learning various software systems